I do the exact same thing Dan does... Dictionaries with a collection as the value type...or worse, as the key. Everytime I do it I think "I'm doing something wrong" but I can't figure out how to do it in any other way. Either that, or I just use a List<T> for everything. That collection class blogpost is going to be a great help.

A good followup post could be about how to pass collections around. FxCop always warns about using Collection<T> when passing stuff around but I can never remember why that's a good idea and when to do it.

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http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/TWC9-Office-365-Internet-Explorer-10-PP2-Choosing-the-Right-collection-class-ToneCheck#c634452972750000000
Sun, 03 Jul 2011 13:41:15 GMThttp://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/TWC9-Office-365-Internet-Explorer-10-PP2-Choosing-the-Right-collection-class-ToneCheck#c634452972750000000ZippyVRe: TWC9: Office 365, Internet Explorer 10 PP2, Choosing the Right collection class, ToneCheck
@Rodney McKay: No worries, always appreciate the feedback, there is a little bit of echo in here and I think we can fix that. As we didn't want to dedicate a show to it, I'll give you the breakdown of the studio as it's unique and geeky in its own way.

TLDR version - The new studio is in addition to our existing one, is self-powered, and has a cool app that runs it that will be open sourced soon.

Edit: I should call out that we are adding soundproofing to part of the room too

Self-Service StudioOne issue that we've had is that we have lots of things that want/need to get recorded in the main studio, but a limited amount of time to shoot and edit those videos. So, Larry Larsen, who manages the studio, has been building out our second "self-service" studio. We call it a self-service studio in that there is no camera man or editor, the person on the screen controls the view (camera shot, PC screen capture, picture-in-picture), starts/stops recording and when completed, walks away with a "done" video file so no need to edit.

Why for TWC9?Editing This Week on Channel 9 is a bit more difficult than most shows since editing involves taking still images of the slides, adding in our intro/outro video, etc so I volunteered us to use this studio going forward since it has everything we need (one camera, PC input) and that gives studio/editing time back to other shows that need multiple cameras or whiteboards or whatever.

Background DesignThe background design is actually the same that we've used for Channel 9 Live events at MIX/PDC for the last four years or so. The primary difference is that instead of using plexiglas (perspex if you're Australian) it's a transparent cloth that, like the plexiglass design, uses LED lighting behind it so that light up the background with colors (blue, green, red, white, orange, etc).

HardwareThe studio has a Datapath screen-capture card, one of our studio cameras, a few wired microphone lavs, and a sound mixer. We also have a simple USB device with buttons to make it easier to control the software. The background has configurable lighting and we could potentially add a way to change in real-time.

SoftwareOn the software side and plugged them all into a custom app that does the recording and the app has keybindings that we use the USB button device to control the source camera, so in the video everything is controlled by me - the dynamic switching between PC, camera, and picture-in-picture, the intro video is embedded into the PowerPoint as is the video at the end (of which you'll notice I cut off accidentally assuming it was done). Jeremiah Morrill and team built the software and we'll be releasing it as an open source app on Coding4Fun at some point once we iron out a few bugs we have.

Self-Service StudioOne issue that we've had is that we have lots of things that want/need to get recorded in the main studio, but a limited amount of time to shoot and edit those videos. So, Larry Larsen, who manages the studio, has been building out our second "self-service" studio. We call it a self-service studio in that there is no camera man or editor, the person on the screen controls the view (camera shot, PC screen capture, picture-in-picture), starts/stops recording and when completed, walks away with a "done" video file so no need to edit.

Regarding the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 training courses. The virtual machines for those courses are running Windows Server 2008 which does not support native boot to VHD. For someone like me, who is using a laptop that does not have intel virtualization technology compatible processor, is stuck using Windows Virtual PC 2007. And it's a pain in the asss to do the lab in such a configuration.

Have you considered upgrade the os to Windows Server 2008 R2 to support native booted vhd?

That's a common misconception with Boot-to-VHD. Boot-to-VHD isjust a file format which can replace the traditional partitioning system.Boot-to-VHD requires that you run on identical hardware – it's not portableacross different machine configurations, just like you couldn't take the harddrive out of one computer and put it in another computer. You could if you syspreppedit, but then that would break all of the ALM software and sample users / datathat's configured on those machines.

The reason they are Windows Server 2008 is so we can ship a32-bit version. Otherwise people using Virtual PC on Windows wouldn't be ableto use it (it would be limited to Hyper-V on Windows Server). However in thefuture for the vNext version of Visual Studio we will likely just ship aWindows Server 2008 R2 image.